


This Blank Card

by karanguni



Category: The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Genre: F/F, Gen, Multi, Special Circumstances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-09-01 05:14:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16758634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: Perosteck Balveda was making a list and, with the assistance of the LCUWise Clairvoyante, checking it twice.





	This Blank Card

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mific/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! :D It was a pleasure to dive back into Consider Phlebas - I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Thanks to ArisTGD for the beta and Kangeiko for the cheerleading/prodding.

_Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,_  
_The lady of situations._  
_Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,_  
_And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,_  
_Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,_  
_Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find  
_ _The Hanged Man. Fear death by water._

\- T.S. Eliot, _The Waste Land_

* * *

There came a pause in the midst of all the fighting.

After the evacuation/destruction of Vavatch Orbital, both the Culture and the Idirians agreed in 1332 to a neutrally-brokered Second Committee On War Conduct so as to review and amend, if necessary, the terms and limitations of a war that had expanded in volume and duration far beyond the projected calculations of either side.

While neither party would even consider the prospect of a ceasefire, there was a generally shared sentiment that there should be something _left_ for the winning side, should there be one, at the end of all hostilities. Carrying on in the current fashion - with the wholesale and ever more indiscriminate destruction of both habitable environments and uninhabitable resources fields - would, it was agreed, benefit no one in the long-term.

There was much hemming and hawing over how the War Conduct Agreement could or should be changed. The Idirians, fuelled by religious zealotry and a lifespan that rivalled most Minds, were wont to fighting for hours, if not days, over the wording of any clause that so much hinted at being too concessionary. The Culture, driven by a intrinsic and (they felt) justified true belief in their position as opponents of the hegemonic and maniacal expansion of the Idirian empire, were just as principled in their stance, and had better dictionaries and philologists besides. Draft after draft was produced, most of them rejected within minutes of their proposal.

It took the Committee over six months to finally amend the agreement to forbid the destruction of populated, non-military habitats. In that time, there was a notional break in the theatre of war: no new fronts were opened, and no existing ones should see action escalated by any significant degree.

It was, therefore, more a political pause than a practical one. No one, after all, told the Idirian troops or Contact agents on the ground in whatever volume of space they happened to be in to stop killing each other. Culture ships did their best to convey the news to their crews, but most Culture citizens, and especially members of Contact, were already as unlikely to kill non-combatant Idirians as they were to fail to defend themselves against combatant ones.

Considering all Idirians, by definition and religion, were combatants, and that all members of the Culture, by citizenship and ontology, were heathens, not much changed between the years 1331 and 1332, or even the years 1332 and 1333.

But there _was_ a pause.

* * *

Perosteck Balveda was making a list and, with the assistance of the LCU _Wise Clairvoyante_ , checking it twice.

'So what is that, ship?' she asked, voice soft but lilting towards ironic as she reviewed the readout on the screen in her bunk.

'Fifteen broken limbs, two cardiac arrests, three cases of systemic organ failure, and one case of very near asphyxiation,' the _Clairvoyante_ confirmed. 'Though I think that you've unfairly discounted yourself of that one incident in Xorola-Beta where you were almost burned alive. Considering that over 50% of your body sustained significant burns, I think it should count.'

'All _this_ in the last two years? Makes one wonder if I'm being re-positioned or just completely recalled from service.'

Balveda shook her head and turned the screen off. She stretched out on her bunk, an AG-field just large enough to give her room to turn around in her sleep. Most members of the Culture would, Balveda knew, consider it a crime against humanity, but most LCUs these days were outfitted for speed, not comfort. In her own opinion, an AG-field hammock was as good as a palatial bed. Better, really: it was safer, more compact, and never quite changed from ship to ship. A Contact agent's dream, really.

It had been two weeks since the _Clairvoyante_ had hard-displaced her off of… wherever it was she had been. It was getting difficult for Balveda to really recall the wheres and the whens of the war: at this point, she'd seen enough battlefields in enough forms to have genericised the lot into mere categories. _Better, bad, worse_. There wasn't a _worst_ , not yet: the worst was always that you died, or caused too many other people to die. Balveda tried not to think about that too much.

Ships - Minds - could go on fighting almost indefinitely. For them, it was both easier and harder at the same time. Some people thought they were spared the viscera of war: the close-up deaths, the hands-on gore. But Minds weren't human: they were _Minds_. They looked at the numbers. They looked at the huge volumes of space. They looked through a multitude of spectra and saw death happening, over and over again, in a technicolour far beyond that of mere visible light. Macroscopic involvement in the fighting was, Balveda could guess, as starkly horrific as any other kind. Minds were just more rational about it for longer, that was all.

Not for forever, though.

'What are they kicking _you_ out for?' Balveda asked the _Clairvoyante_ , albeit nicely. 'If we drop the pretense that you're taking me to someplace far away that Contact needs me to go, I'd guess that we've both been scheduled for some... time off.' Two Contact units speeding _away_ from the various fronts instead of towards them? Balveda wasn't blind. She doubted the ship was, either.

'Burnt my engines out, or near about, doing a run with a GOU,' the ship replied candidly.

'What were you doing that for?' Balveda asked, closing her eyes. 'Not to be insulting, ship, but there's no way you could outrun one of those new pickets… Could you?' She cracked an eyelid open.

'It was a _very_ lost cause,' the ship said. 'But I was what was available, and I did it. It'll work out, I think: do something crazy enough like that and the powers that be will reward you with more crazy.'

Balveda connected the dots. 'So you think we're getting sent along to the GSV _No More Mr. Nice Guy_ for you to get refitted?'

'There's a possibility,' the _Clairvoyante_ confessed. 'They engineer GOU Minds for their tasks, I know, but there's something to be said for those of us who've been around the block some and who _don't_ just open fire on anything that scans wrong. Even if I don't end up in a GOU classification, they'll either give me something faster or refit me that way.'

'And what about me, you think?' Balveda asked. 'As one Contact individual to another, what do you think they want to do about me?'

'Could be anything, really,' the ship said, sounding apologetic. 'Maybe they really _do_ need you back there. Recruitment's difficult - well, I should rephrase. _Evaluating_ all of Contact's many enthusiastic sign-ups is difficult, since goodness knows there are plenty of civilians who seem to think it's romantic to throw themselves into the fray. I know there is a new GSV on the _No More Mr. Nice Guy_ which still needs to be manned and crewed, and there's always room for a Contact agent on board one of those.'

'I don't know, ship,' Balveda said, critical. 'I'm a field agent, not a recruiter. Maybe they've think I've finally lost it - my touch, that is.' She recalled the list. 'Maybe I'm costing us more than I'm helping.'

'I doubt that, Perosteck,' the ship said, almost gentle. 'Have you heard what one of SC's has done out near the edge of the Clouds? I've got quite the internal circular if you want to read it - the agent went just mad. Lost it completely. Made himself grand monarch and started up a cult. It's fascinating reading - but anyway. No, I don't think you've lost your touch. I think, maybe, that you could just do with a little rest. Engines aren't the only things that burn out.'

'Maybe,' Balveda said, softly. She yawned, and the ship started to turn the lights in the cabin down. 'We'll see, I suppose. How much longer until we get to this GSV?'

'Another day,' the _Clairvoyante_ replied. 'I'm taking it a little easier than I normally would.'

'That's fine,' Balveda said, turning in her AG field. 'Take care of yourself, ship.'

'Sleep well, Perosteck,' it replied, and turned the lights off completely.

* * *

They arrived at the _No More Mr. Nice Guy_ in good time. The _Clairvoyante_ said its goodbyes to Balveda as they waited for a module to come pick her up from the large bay it was parked in for repairs.

'Ship,' Balveda said to it as she sat waiting.

'Yes, Perosteck?'

'Do you _want_ to be stuck inside an Offensive Unit, when the war ends?'

The ship took some time to reply, as if thinking about it. 'When the war ends,' it asked her in turn, 'will they still be _called_ Offensive Units, or just... very fast pickets?'

The thought made Balveda smile. She watched on the ship's screens as a module zipped up and parked next to them. 'I hope you break many records, ship,' she told the _Clairvoyante_. 'Hopefully good ones.'

'Take care of yourself, Perosteck,' the ship echoed, opening up a door for her to get through to the module. 'Goodbye.'

Balveda stepped through and the module started to whisk her away.

'Hello, Perosteck Balveda,' came the voice of the _No More Mr. Nice Guy_. 'Welcome board.'

'Hullo, ship,' she said, and was almost surprised when a seat moulded itself out of the wall. Not just a lousy chair, either, but something properly ergonomic and hugely comfortable. It made Balveda's spine curl when she sat down on it.

'Would you like something to drink?' the module asked. 'It will be a moment getting you to your quarters. Those'll be in the Hecking Good Quadrant, very near the university's centre for comparative theology. Academic crowd, but I can find you something else if it doesn't suit you for the duration of your stay.'

'That sounds fine, ship, thank you,' Balveda said, momentarily overwhelmed by the niceties that came with being on a General Systems Vehicle. Everything was too big, almost; too easy. She patted the arm of the chair and thought about glanding something to calm herself down, but then decided against it. 'A cup of tea, if you would.'

'I have quite the selection,' the GSV demurred. 'I doubt you want me to list them all, but do you have a kind that you would prefer?'

'Something dark and strong, please,' Balveda said, and was duly presented with a steaming mug of something that smelled vaguely like the flowers of Eldin-IV. She sipped at it and kept her attention on the map of the GSV: over two billion souls were spread out across eight quadrants ("I _thought_ it was funny when I came up with it, Perosteck, and now it's stuck"), with all the bells and whistles of the Culture besides: universities, parks, playgrounds for the young and old, and everything else.

Balveda was just beginning to feel out of place when the ship broke in, 'Before you ask, you have a meeting scheduled with one Ms. Shilde Sma of Contact later tomorrow, once you've settled in. Shall I confirm the appointment?'

Balveda relaxed. 'Yes, ship, please and thank you.'

'Done and done. And here we are,' the module chimed, coming to a stop and opening up into a sprawling cobblestone square. A fountain burbled in the middle, and there were people strolling, laughing, talking, eating at small tables at the tiny cafes dotted along the sides of the central area. 'Welcome back.'

'It's good to be back,' Balveda said, but was not entirely sure when that would begin to _feel_ true.

* * *

Her quarters were more than adequate, and Balveda was feeling a lot less pessimistic and shocky by the time she had had a long bath and a longer session in a sauna. She emerged, dripping sweat and clad only in a towel, and was glad to spend a few useless minutes deciding what to wear out of the well-stocked closet in the bedroom. Balveda settled on a long, silvery dress with a narrow, emerald green lace back. The floor-length skirt was hugely impractical, as were the heeled shoes she picked out to go with it, and there was something truly glorious about that.

The Idirians would have called it hedonistic, and so what if it was? That was the point, after all. The Culture was fighting a saintly war for the right of its citizens to be exactly the sinners they wanted to be. The idea of _sin_ didn't even make _sense_ , did it? So Belveda, for the first time in quite a while, put up her hair.

Looking in the mirror, she was not an unhandsome woman. Very few people in the Culture were, even if definitions of what was ugly or bizarre changed from person to person. It was never quite their physical features, Balveda thought as she put on a set of dangling pearl and quartz earrings. It was their comportment, really. The stuff that was inside them, and they stuff they were made out of inside. She still had that. Her eyes were tired, that was true, but she was still a good poster-child for Contact because, well, fuck.

'I still believe, don't I?' Balveda asked herself, knowing it was a little bit crazy to be talking to her reflection. She touched the mirror, watched her hand meet its twin in the reflection. 'I still believe in this whole fucking crazy thing.'

Where _thing_ meant nothing and everything, because the Culture _was_ its people. It didn't matter that Balveda herself had lost a good number of her friends, many of whom were either Contact like she was or pacifists who'd either abandoned her or the Culture as a whole. It didn't matter that every new assignment felt like she was grating her very bones down to dust. If she - if _they_ \- were going to fight, they had to fight for the things that seemed completely meaningless - the parties, the cobblestone squares, the thousands of choices of tea. Trying to make _more_ out of it would have been the real crime.

Balveda stepped back and exhaled. 'All right, Perostek,' she said to herself. 'You _are_ back.'

She got herself a float car to take her sightseeing. The gentle breeze from the motion of the vehicle set her hair trailing down her back, brushing against her shoulder-blades and the length of her spine and getting caught, here and there, on the lace of her dress. By the time Balveda found herself at a patio party, where roses climbed up the sides of dusty brick walls to greet people with crazy, multi-petalled blooms, she was hungry for some humanity.

It was false sunset by the time Balveda - a good few drinks in and gloriously, giddily, splendidly alive and free of mud and shit and blood and the grime of war - found herself pressing her dark-skinned companion up against one of the suddenly convenient brick walls. They were in the gardens, in a little nook set inside a hedge-maze. By the sounds of it, they weren't the only ones who had wandered into a convenient dead end.

The short-haired woman in her arms grinned at Balveda. 'You seem like someone with some steam to blow off,' she said.

'You probably have no idea how much,' Balveda confessed quietly, a hand on the woman's waist as her counterpart trailed blunt fingernails up the bared sections of her back.

'Watch the roses,' the woman advised.

'I shall do my best,' Balveda said, sombrely as she could, but she was smiling too much to pull it off. She let a hand creep up the woman's thigh, pushing up her skirt and grazing a thumb across her hipbone. Balveda drank in the lazy, confident pleasure on her companion's face like water after a long and lonely time in the desert.

'Trousers are so very overrated for parties,' her new friend said. 'The grass here is soft enough - could I convince you to get down on your knees, or should we take this somewhere more comfortable?'

'This,' Balveda said with complete honesty as she got down to kneel, 'is _more_ than comfortable enough for me.'

* * *

They did eventually find their way to somewhere _much_ more comfortable.

* * *

That morning, or night, or whatever glorious schedule-free time of day it was when they woke up, Balveda turned in the woman's embrace and said, sheepishly, 'I completely forgot to ask your name. I'm sorry. Mine is Perostek Balveda.'

The woman smiled down at her, and something in the back of Balveda's mind, something _deep_ in her brain stem, that part of her that'd kept her alive through hell and worse, started shouting. Loudly.

'I'm Shilde Sma,' said her companion, her _Contact handler_. ' _Very_ pleased to meet you.'

'Oh,' Balveda said in horror, recalling _rapidly_ the events of the night before and the way she'd been so self-satisfied at her own pinning of a soft, behind-the-front civ down against equally too-soft sheets. 'Fuck.'

'Again?' purred Shilde, flipping them in a move that belied none of the civilian cluelessness of last night. 'Don't mind if we do.'

* * *

It was a refreshing experience to feel embarrassed, Balveda reflected dazedly as she ordered them both breakfast later that morning. Evening. Whatever it was. Embarrassment implied a certain amount of contextual awareness, after all: you had to _know_ you'd done something stupid to feel this dumb. Balveda had spent a lot of her time recently as a confused fish out of water, completely alone and usually completely unaware of what was right or wrong or funny or dangerous.

This, at least, she knew what to do with. Pink down her neck to the vee of the robe she was wearing, Balevda poured Shilde some juice and settled into a chair in time to say, 'Well. At least I'm not late for our appointment.'

Shilde smiled and accepted the glass. 'We're not in a rush,' she told Balveda. 'The Second Committee is still fighting over semi-colons and full-stops.'

'Committees are all well and good, but...' Balveda motioned with one hand to one of the screens on the far wall. She'd put it up entirely automatically, last night, and it was programmed to show a map of the war theatre. Idirian and Culture colours flashed everywhere like crazy lights. Shilde flicked a glance at it but said nothing. 'I suppose what I want to know is: am I on home leave, or am I on permanent leave?' Unable to keep looking at Shilde, Balveda started in on her own breakfast plate.

'Contact doesn't work that way and you know it,' Shilde said quietly. 'Why do you think you're here?'

'A re-evaluation, perhaps?' Balveda offered, quietly unhappy. 'A kind decommissioning?'

'We don't have enough people left to decommission agents,' Shilde said matter-of-factly, cutting into the omelette in front of her. 'I suppose you could say that I am evaluating you, yes, but you should know by now that it's more precautionary than preventative.'

'What does _that_ mean?'

'Prevention is when Contact doesn't put unfit new agents onto the field,' Shilde shrugged. 'Precautions are when Contact evaluates all its current agents so that, if or when something goes wrong, they have an explanation _why_. Doesn't mean that they'll stop sending you out: just that if you go eccentric or worse...' A shrug of one shoulder. 'Don't take it personally. It's a certain calculation we do.'

Balveda nodded along. Realpolitik: a hated Culture word, a treasured Contact policy. This was easier to take than a gentle dismissal; easier to understand, too. 'And that calculation is...' Balveda let herself think about it. 'It's better the devil you know than the one you don't? Keep as many civilians as possible behind the lines, where they'll live in enough ignorance about the war effort to carry on the Culture _without_ being tempted to defect to the Ulterior or anywhere else?'

Shilde raised her juice glass in a toast. 'More or less. Thank you, Perosteck,' she said, wiping her mouth. 'You're making the report I'll have to write a lot easier. So, if you want - if you _can_ \- take this as a bit of a respite before the gong-show starts up again, that's really all it is for you.'

'Why take me all the way out here, then?' Balveda asked. 'Not that I don't appreciate the creature comforts, but I could have taken this break on any number of Contact vehicles closer to where the action is.'

'Reach a certain tenure with Contact and eventually we want you to learn to do more than shoot guns and sign treaties,' Shilde smiled. 'I've got a few recruitment tasks I wanted your opinion on, and since we could bring you back, we did.'

Balveda blinked. 'Recruitment?'

'You'll see,' Shilde said serenely.

* * *

'Oh, gods,' Balveda exclaimed softly, looking at the application in front of her and then at the viewscreen that the ship had pulled up for them. The small, spherical casing that contained Unaha-Closp bobbed easily through the air as the drone headed for one of the ship's theology sub-libraries.

'It's not exactly easy to find individuals who have seen significant action,' Shilde said at her side. 'The reports that came in about Schar's World indicated that it might have some innate talent.'

Balveda looked down at the drone's application papers for entry into the Culture. 'If you're asking me if I'll endorse its application for citizenship,' she said, looking up at Shilde, 'I have no objections. But if you're considering it for _Contact_?'

Shilde shrugged. Balveda shook her head. 'I don't think it would be a good fit.'

'It saved your life,' Shilde pointed out, and watched Balveda hesitate. 'Talk to it. Take a few days, and give me your opinion after that.'

Balveda pushed the application back across the table at Shilde. 'All right,' she said. 'Approve it. And I'll talk with it - you're right that Schar's World might have changed it.' Something deep inside of Balevda certainly felt changed by the experience: so far she had done her best to outrun the sensation, to never look back at that particular abyss.

Shilde arranged it so that Balveda would be the one to break the news of the drone's acceptance into the Culture. Feeling like a courier, Balveda walked over to the theology libraries and found the drone fields-deep in the stacks.

'Hello, Unaha-Closp,' she said to it, leaning against one of the shelves. 'It's me.'

The drone spun itself around. 'Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alesyn Balveda dam T'seif!' it cried out.

'You don't have to pass a test where you prove you know how our names work,' Balveda smiled at it. Unaha-Closp's voice was as tinny and mildly grating as it had been before: a repair job well done, then. Balveda projected a screen with the drone's acceptance notice on it. 'Congratulations. Welcome to the Culture.'

'This is fantastic news,' Unaha-Closp declared. What it said afterwards, Balveda could not quite recall later: something about the happy termination of its bonds, and an excited summary of its future plans for life within the Culture. The fervour of the converted, she supposed.

Balveda allowed the drone to take her on a tour of the University's theology department.

'I was going to enroll in an Orbital programme,' it said to her, 'but all things considered I had better stay on one of the GSVs and help out, I think.'

'How so?' Balveda asked, paying attention now.

Unaha-Closp shivered in the air. ' _Building things,_ ' it said. 'I was an _excellent_ overseer at my previous place of employ, even if the technologies which were utilised there have nothing on the war effort. GOUs, I hear, require engines that have a 99 in 100 failure rate during manufacture, which is an _enormous_ waste except that it's necessary...'

The rest of the lap around the department involved Unaha-Closp enlightening Balveda on engineering details that were quite beyond her. She was happy for it, but it most of all convinced her of the drone's place behind the front. Individuals, Balveda knew, could be perfectly capable of fighting to survive when required, but that instinct to _survive_ was not the same as an instinct to _fight_.

* * *

Balveda made her report to Shilde in person.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I just don't think it's cut out for the front lines. It'll make an excellent engineer, but Contact? No.' Shilde nodded, and Balveda found herself shifting uncomfortably. 'So, that's that, then. Task accomplished. What _next_?'

There was a bit of a pause from the Contact handler. 'I thought you would want to stay a little longer,' Shilde said to Balveda eventually. 'Get to know the drone in a non-hostage situation, settle in again.'

'How long have you been here in the back away from it all, Shilde?' Balveda asked, suddenly tired. 'No. I don't want to get to know the drone. I don't want to remember. I don't want to _stay still_. I want to keep moving, if that's what you'll let me do.' Then, frustrated, she stood. 'No more mind games, please. No more tests. Either use me, or don't - but don't make me pretend to be Contact when I'm not.'

If Shilde was taken aback by the outburst, the woman did not show it. 'Schar's World,' she said to Balveda. 'It was too much, wasn't it?'

'Maybe,' Balveda admitted, but then shrugged. 'Maybe not. I don't know. Maybe it isn't simply Schar's World - this has been a long war, and it isn't over yet. You need me. Contact needs me. _I_ need _Contact_.' It wasn't the fighting that was difficult, Balveda knew now: it was _stopping_. That frightened her.

Shilde, dressed in pants and a long vest, leaned back in her chair while Balveda stood, paced, then sat again. 'You could forget,' she told Balveda. 'You could let yourself forget; medically, we can help you do that permanently.'

'Isn't the point of it, isn't the value in it,' Balveda asked, 'that I _remember_?'

'All right,' Shilde said softly. 'I hear you, Perosteck, loud and clear. If you're sure - we'll send you back.

 _Good_ , Balveda thought, and hated herself for wanting to be at a war front more than at home.

But where was home these days, really?

* * *

They could not simply send Balveda back to the front at a drop of a pin: as with everything Contact, it was now time to hurry up and wait. The new GSV being built in the _Clairvoyante_ was due to be finished very soon, and it would be the one to take her on to the next engagement once the War Committee finished its business.

There wasn't, Balveda found, much else to do in the GSV besides go back to civilian life. Eat. Drink. Sleep. Be... merry.

The citizens on the ship were not completely insulated from the war - no one really could be. The news was on every screen, and the _Clairvoyante_ itself was a major factory of hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of war materiel. The university dedicated a non-trivial amount of attention towards analysing the strategies in play, and besides the subsection of people who kept themselves wilfully ignorant about current affairs, almost everyone had some vague idea of how they thought the war was going, and some definite opinions about how it _should_ go.

Going out - whether it was to a bar, to the swimming pools, to a library - make Balveda uneasy. She was less jumping at shadows than she was startled by the lack of them: everything in the Culture felt too clean, too _easy_.

'Perosteck,' said Sheh, an old friend of hers who was within real-time video link range, 'you need to relax. You've got some down time - use it! I can't imagine what it must be like doing what you normally do. Don't you want to, I don't know... Take a break? I'm worried about you.'

It was justifiable concern and a reasonable suggestion. Balveda resented it nonetheless. 'I don't _want_ the down time, Sheh,' she said softly. 'I don't know what taking a break means, when there's so much still going on.'

'It's all going to stop one day,' Sheh pointed out. 'Whether we win or not. I mean, I _hope_ we win, but one way or another - if you and I live to see it - there _will_ be an end. And then what?'

'I... don't know,' Balveda admitted, looking away. 'I haven't thought that far down the line.'

'But you're _Contact_ ,' Sheh exclaimed, clearly surprised. 'Of all of us, _you_ guys are the ones who are keeping your eyes on the finish line, right?'

'We should be,' Balveda said. 'The Minds do. The rest of us - well. If you always look up and ahead, sometimes you end up tripping on things which are right in front of you.'

'What does _that_ mean?'

'Nevermind,' Balveda sighed. 'It's nothing. You're right - I should appreciate take advantage of being home for a while. By the way - I wanted to ask, purely out of curiosity... How many times have you broken a bone in your life?'

Sheh didn't know how many times she'd broken bones in her life, as it turned out. The answer was definitively something along the lines of "not many." Civilians didn't, Balveda realised, keep track of these sorts of things.

So it wasn't nothing, everything that Balveda now found herself tripping over, and if home was a place where someone belonged, then this was not quite home either. Balveda didn't share the sentiments of the peace factioners, who'd defected rather than continue the passive endorsement of a violent war, but she wondered if it was possible to feel too much on the other side: if she'd fought so many types of people who opposed the Culture as decadent pleasure-seekers that, coming back, she could now see her own people as nothing _but_.

* * *

Shilde got back in touch a few days after Balveda put herself in self-imposed isolation in her room.

'You know how you said you didn't want to forget Schar's World?' she asked Balveda, not bothering - thankfully, _blessedly_ \- with niceties or greetings. 'Well. Contact would like you to _really_ remember. The GSV is ready - are you?'

'Yes,' Balveda said, sick with and sickened by relief.

'Follow me, then.'

Shilde summoned a module. Balveda followed. 'What do you mean when you say you want me to _really_ remember?' she asked as the module started moving, headed towards the bays.

'Experiences like what happened on Schar's World are traumatic, as you know better than anyone,' Shilde said. 'I wasn't joking, the other day, when I pointed out that you could be made to forget: it's what we _do_ , sometimes, to protect ourselves. But then afterwards we have a part of our narrative - a key part - that's missing, and that can be quite hard to deal with in and of itself.'

The module drew up to the largest of the _No More Mr. Nice Guy_ 's construction bays. On the module screen was the huge, almost unbelievable scale of the newly finished GSV: it gleamed, enormous and slippery silver, inside of the distended belly of its parent's fields.

'It's ready to go, the ship,' Shilde said to Balveda as they docked with it. 'Its Mind was installed just yesterday, and the Committee wrapped up this morning.'

Together, they stepped inside the GSV. It was a singular feeling to be the first and only human souls on board - awe-inspiring, almost spiritual. Cleansing, in some ways, without being sterile: Balveda realised that it was, perhaps, because she was witnessing a birth, the first she'd witnessed in a long while. Most of her friends - the ones who weren't dead or likely to die - were abstaining from having children for the time.

Balveda was so distracted she almost forgot to be polite. 'Hello, ship,' she said to it, when she caught herself. 'What is your name?'

'I am the GSV _Bora Horza Gorbuchul_ ,' it replied. 'It is a pleasure to meet you finally, Ms. Balveda. Contact tells me that you're going to tell me my story. I would very much like to hear it...'


End file.
